Founding Myths

Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past

By Ray Raphael

The New Press, 2005

354 pages, $51 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/35592

Paul Revere must be the most important person in the history of the United States. His midnight ride from Boston in April 1775 to warn the people of Massachusetts that "the British are coming" single-handedly saved the American revolutionary war for independence. It is an ageless, high-rotation story, but, argues Ray Raphael in Founding Myths, it is also wrong.

Revere, says Raphael, was not a lone hero, but one of many patriots who carried intelligence about British troop mobilisations to the farmers and labourers, and their militias, of the American colonies. Unlike the legend, Revere only half completed his mission, rousing the militia in Lexington but being captured before he reached Concord. This failure, however, did not matter, because other riders got through. Yet beginning with a Longfellow poem in 1861, Revere was promoted to the key individual who held "the fate of a nation" in his hands.

Raphael's debunking history of the legends of the American Revolution entertainingly shows how the iconic stories of a few heroic individuals and key events of the independence struggle have been manufactured and processed to mask what was a popular revolution made by hundreds of thousands of activists. Orthodox history and storytelling have combined to create an imagined and de-revolutionised past "in the service of a political present" of patriotic conservatism.

In politically safe history, there is a pantheon of revered "Founders" (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Sam and John Adams) who are set high above the mass of common people. Jefferson, for example, is credited with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, among other acts of genius, but this denigrates the grassroots political ferment that sprouted 90 declarations of independence at the local community level in the months preceding the official declaration.

Conservative history's elevation of an elite handful of respectable founders to starring roles aims to make us defer to, and be de-radicalised by, their monopoly on "politics". As Raphael writes, however, "fame and significance are not synonymous". The famous few are rarely as significant as their publicity makes out, while the significant many are rarely famous.

Events, too, have been singled out to submerge the popular making of a revolution. The "shot heard 'round the world'" (the first exchange of formal armed hostilities in 1775 at Lexington) is typically recounted as the start of the revolutionary war, but this timing relegates to near-oblivion the actual outbreak of revolution six months before when "tens of thousands of angry patriotic militiamen" overthrew British authority through all of Massachusetts outside of Boston.

This revolution, however, is at best remembered in grudging references to "rural unrest". The US officially celebrates the break from Britain but does not "celebrate the raw and rampant power of the people who made this happen — farmers in frocks and mud-caked boots, not gentry in dress suits and wigs". In the approved script, the American Revolution was not a real revolution because a democratic uprising for popular sovereignty (which it was) would, says Raphael, be a bad precedent for subsequent US rulers.

Among other realities given the historical heave-ho is the rank-and-file radicalism of General Washington's Continental Army. The tale of epic stoicism of the army at Valley Forge in the harsh winter of 1777-78 is meant to portray the "patient suffering" of the soldiers of the revolution. Although "the times tried men's souls", the patriotic provisional government added a major load to the burden by not supplying adequate food, clothing or pay.

Soldiers, at Valley Forge and elsewhere, resisted through desertion and mutiny. The ideals of the revolution had found their way into the army, where soldiers "exhibited the freedom they were fighting for". As one general complained, the soldiers "carry the spirit of freedom into the field, and think for themselves". "The privates are all generals", he lamented.

Like the soldiers, women were among the significant but unremarked many. Women "camp followers" were the logistical heroes who cooked, washed, nursed and carried supplies to the soldiers. Their contribution was crucial, but was marked by drudgery not high drama. Yet one idealised female hero — Molly Pitcher (a folk legend who fired the cannon of a slain soldier) — has been propelled to sole prominence, overshadowing her real but anonymous sisters.

Selective quotations have also served to disguise other, less savoury, realities of the revolution. "Give me liberty or give me death" are the famous words of the rebel patriot Patrick Henry, but the sentiments were not as noble (love of liberty) as indicated. "Give me more slaves" and "give me more Indian territory" were also firmly on the mind of this white southern land- and slave-owning patriot leader.

Southern patriots feared the British policy of offering slaves their freedom if they sided with the British. This (false) promise enticed tens of thousands of slaves to flee their republican masters (including 20 of Washington's 300 slaves). But white history has largely ignored the experience of the half-million slaves, whilst Hollywood and Mel Gibson have turned history on its head in the movie The Patriot, where black field hands in South Carolina rebuff the British offer whilst Congress emancipates the slaves. In reality, although 5000 blacks did become American soldiers (in the north), many more thousands joined the British (in the south). Either way, the slaves acted in their own strategic interests — for their own independence.

The revolution also balked at another skin colour. The American Revolution was the largest Indian war in US history, as both sides courted Delaware, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee and other Native Americans. Many were killed in battle while the patriots implemented a vicious, scorched-earth policy of wiping out entire British-aligned Indian civilisations and then, after the revolution, undertook a massive land grab of Indian territory through western expansion. These stories are excluded from the canon by latter-day patriots, because the official history of the nation-defining American Revolution must be free of patriotic Americans as cruel conquerors, avaricious thieves and terrorists.

Raphael's is an honest appraisal of the American Revolution that acknowledges its failings, its triumphs and its contested legacy. As he shows, the revolution's radical core (popular sovereignty) has been usurped by the domestic capitalist elite and its tame historians. Reverential and adulatory biographies of the "Founders" encourage political deference to an elite. Canonical stories of key individuals, events and quotations inspire no revolutionary views.

However, in his stirring demolition job on the "great man", individualist school of conservative history, Raphael over-corrects and belittles the role that individuals play, particularly concerning leadership and ideology. "First hand experience" was enough, says Raphael, to give the rebels all the understanding they needed. Their spontaneous action was all that was needed to win. They did not need any leaders, even radical polemicists like Tom Paine.

Yet the ideas and writings of Paine, and even, in their diluted form, of Jefferson, Franklin and others who articulated the consciousness of the farmers and labourers and who provided a political analysis and goal for the revolution, were vital to the success of the revolution. Paine's 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, sold a sensational 150,000 copies among a population of only 3 million and its political and literary power ensured that even the illiterate heard its inspirational call for popular sovereignty read out in place of religious sermons.

Ideas, and their purveyors, matter. Even Raphael must think so because, like Paine, he has gone to the trouble to put pen to paper in the highly effective service of people's history. If spontaneous consciousness and actions are sufficient, why bother writing pamphlets to make history-from-below, like Paine, or writing books to interpret and celebrate it, like Raphael.

Despite his anarchist/spontaneist, leader-phobic politics, Raphael has rescued the real revolution from the storybook revolution. When Britain mobilised the largest military force ever assembled in the 18th century to suppress a rebellion for popular democracy, it took mass resistance to triumph. Raphael's sparkling history gives the anonymous, "historically irrelevant" people of this mass their historical justice.